How should Lemmy sort posts so small communities can compete?

But to be fair I didn’t say that killing those filters would solve every problem, just that it would eliminate that implicit incentive to seek the reward to be highlighted at the top. Through “easy to be enraged by posts”, “karma-farming like reddit posts” or just hoards of low effort memes just to mention a few.

There is no karma-posting on here though. People post a lot because they want their communities to grow. This is the case with /new/ only or /hot/. The habits won’t change.

Mentioning the upvote/downvote system, I always said that we could do without it and it would be for the better. I said it on reddit for many years. I say it here as well. It’s actually the most easy to hijack feature of them all: bots, brigade hits, you name it. I never thought of this being the defining feature of reddit, but its biggest flaw. The community building, the interchangeable branches of discussions, that was what reddit got right and was stolen to the end of the earth for it. Virtually every platform stole this after 2005/2006.

Remember though that the Fediverse has public voting, so any attempts to game it are often caught and the perpetrators banned. This is very unlike Reddit. Upvoting/downvoting as a system is not perfect, it’s incomplete - and alternative systems could exist, however a react system of some sort is necessary to curate content across the board for the audience.

Like I said, I have the list of communities as my homepage and then I go through them chronologically in whatever I’m interested to check out that day. I don’t know what you mean by never seeing any posts past an hour. I don’t follow any communities here that if I don’t come here for three or four days (which happens frequently) that I couldn’t go through them quickly. Even back then on reddit, I didn’t have this issue with the communities that I followed. But I never followed high traffic nonsense.

I mean that if only /new/ existed, then after an hour or so - a small community is invisible unless they keep posting constantly. Because people are unlikely to scroll back and notice posts from that community.

We should have like a “town hall” like instance for all federated administrators and mods to talk and vote on directions to take and have users vote. This is only valuable if we implement the same rails and safeguards as in the structuring of a great democracy. And Lemmy can function like a beacon to why federated municipality should be the future of democracy. Even deciding a cap on the number of maximum registrations per instance is not a bad idea to start throwing as numbers increase. I was on Lemm.ee. It was nothing terrible that happened there, it was just too much.

The Fediverse is far too small to even discuss bringing up guards against growth now. In addition, instances can have wildly different - and do have wildly different local policies on community creation, account creation, federation, upvoting (some disable upvotes and downvotes) and many other things if possible. Some instances - as I’m sure you are aware of just don’t get on with each other and their own respective userbases would have different opinions over policy.

It’s better to have large numbers spread around many instances, than to have them in just a few. This is the right way to scale up. The more centralised and large the more easy it is to corrupt it. And the harder it is to manage it. Smaller instances will know better how to maintain its base and to manage it. Rimu (the piefed creator) already said he is thinking about closing the registrations on the instance he manages. Which is the one I’m on.

I must have missed Rimu saying that recently. I am also on piefed.social. He only communciated that for storage reasons to me in the past.

By all means help people set up other instances, but have them be small. Lemmy.world is constantly being hit with new registered trolls and instigators and it is very clear why they pick it, because it is the larger instance and hijacks the lemmyverse attention in the process through this same filters we are speaking of, which is whay I’m on this detour. I also want to say that the administrators and mods have done a great job, but I’m seeing the same cracks that I saw on lemm.ee start to show in that is becoming too much for them to handle so much. It’s not that they are making bad decisions or becoming terrible at all, is that it is starting to become impossible for them to keep the standards they have maintained so far. It’s too much to handle. That’s all.

This is part because the Lemmy software lacks trivial safeguards against day 1 trolls by the way. They can’t even delay community creation for X days for new accounts because Lemmy simply doesn’t have it built in as an option.